One way is to try Michael Behe’s knockout test – systematically try knocking out every piece of a machine, and see if there are any parts that aren’t absolutely essential. If everything’s critical, the system clearly couldn’t appear by evolution, because there simply is no previous step. Either the whole thing appeared fully formed, or it wouldn’t have appeared at all. I have a different idea: push evolution fast enough that you can see it happen, and watch for it to hit a wall.

I laid out the details here, and now I want to find out if this experiment would be practical – I might need an impractically huge population of bacteria to make it work. The first thing I need to learn is all the types of mutations that happen to living things:

In my previous post, I laid out my idea of how to test for evolution’s limit (irreducible complexity) in a lab. Basically I’d try so many mutations on so many creatures that I’d be almost guaranteed to get a good one – assuming, of course, that life really appeared by evolution.

I have a big problem, though: I need a really big population to make this work. Based on what I currently know of genetics, I might need such a big population that even a lake full of bacteria wouldn’t be big enough.

As I do the math to find out if my idea is practical, here are some assumptions I’m making. I’ll also make some educated guesses about what would really happen.

I might have figured out how to test for evolution’s limit in a lab. In my previous series, I fixed a loophole in the definition of evolution’s limit. In this series, I plan to learn whether my idea is practical. I’ll list a bunch of info related to calculating how fast evolution must happen if it’s really how life appeared. I hope to finish by calculating how big of a population I’d need to make my experiment work.

Here’s my idea:

Evolution is a game of chance. It has rules – like the laws of physics, the current environment, and interaction with other creatures – and each mutation is a roll of the dice. A good mutation is like rolling three 6’s in Risk – it’s very rare. I want to cheat.

One rule of evolution is that it usually happens too slow to see. If someone wants to study evolution – whether to test or confirm it – they must wait millions of years. Since we humans don’t live that long, we have to speed up evolution to see it happen. One way is to roll the dice very quickly – do mutation and natural selection to something with incredibly short generation times. Another way is to roll a big bucket of dice all at once.

In video games and movies, an easter egg is a message/feature/etc that’s hidden in the main work for geeks to find. Game developers hide their names in the game, things from one franchise mysteriously appear in another, and private jokes hide in the most inaccessible places in the virtual world. There’s at least one easter egg in the Bible.

If there was only one verse like this, it could be merely an interesting coincidence. They’re in poems and prophecies, which make heavy use of rhetoric and symbolism. But at least 17 places in the Bible mention it, so they’re clearly not a coincidence. Here are a few of them:

I might have figured out how to test in a lab for evolution’s limit (irreducible complexity), and I’m reading up on the subject to find out if my idea is practical. I’m using this as an excuse to learn more about evolution’s limit.

I noticed a loophole irreducible complexity’s definition which would’ve declared that some things could appear by evolution, even when they really can’t. So I started by reading up on the definition of irreducible complexity and some common objections that evolutionists raise.

I’m finally ready to give my improved definition. This is the one I plan to use in my test of evolution’s limit – assuming that the math works out. I reserve the right to change my definition if I find another loophole.